Over the last several years, developers have moved from table-based website structures to div-based structures. Hey, that’s great. But wait! Do developers know the reasons for moving to div-based structures, and do they know how to? Often it seems that people are moving away from table hell only to wind up in div hell. This article covers common problems with layout structure. The first part goes through what table and div hells are, including lots of examples. The next section shows how to write cleaner and more readable code. The final part looks at what features await in future. Please join us on this journey from hell to heaven. You're in table hell when your website uses tables for design purposes. Tables generally increase the complexity of documents and make them more difficult to maintain. Also, they reduce a website’s flexibility in accommodating different media and design elements, and they limit a website's functionality.

Hope that helps,

Shawn

Stevie_D
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2013-05-10T07:12:52Z —
#4

mpnzep said:

What should I use divs or table to create an online product catalog?

Which would be the better way?.

If you have tabular data that is related through rows and columns, use a table. For anything else, including a grid-like presentation, use appropriate semantic elements, usually DIV or UL/LI. The topic has been discussed extensively here and elsewhere, so why not use the search function and read what we said last time round?